“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 10 PM I asked Jane if she felt like having a session. We’d been visited today by Loren, Betts and Doug, and Dick, Ida and David, and at times my left groin area had bothered me considerably. Now after everyone had gone—Dick and family stayed until about 8 PM—I felt poorly indeed. As I had last spring, I didn’t know whether my symptoms of unease were physical or mental, and was very concerned. I thought of a hernia—and Loren had been operated on for a hernia this summer—yet I suspected the unease was basically mental. This had been the case last spring. And now, those feelings had returned. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the proper adjective to describe the groin sensations; they weren’t ones of pain—but what?

(In fact, I’d been bothered more and more in recent days—ever since, I thought, the family get-together had been suggested by Betts a couple of weeks ago. Yet all through the summer I didn’t think I’d fully bounced back from last spring’s rather drastic upsets. I’d taken to giving myself suggestions each morning upon arising, before calling Jane, and these had helped. Yet I knew the symptoms lingered beneath the surface, one might say.

(Today as the family members talked and took photographs and watched television and ate. and so forth, I felt the discomfort in the left groin sweep over me in waves. Twice I went off to use the pendulum. Each time it helped, temporarily. I thought of asking Jane for help, but disliked doing so because I could see that she was doing very well. I didn’t want to introduce negative elements into the day, especially so since her performance was much better than it had been last year when everyone had gotten together. [After that gathering she’s had strong upsets of her own.]

Think of the slides shown today (by Loren) of postcard Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, USA, home of conventional, American, Protestant values. I am (underlined) generalizing here to make a point: a largely postcard land, in which social clichés pass for communication, in which social ceremonies take the place of private communications—a land in which beliefs must be like landmarks, unchanging, utterly dependable, always there to be used for touchstones lest the puritanical Protestant stray from worthy goals. A land in which things must be judged thus-and-so, a land in which people disappear as much as possible into established family and social roles, where the lines are clearly marked.

There is nothing wrong with your body. The memories and associations bring old beliefs to mind, and you see in such family visits the culmination in your brothers of those old beliefs. You must say: “They are mine no longer. I appreciate my own unique worth.” You must liberate yourself whenever such thoughts arise to mind—not by inhibiting them but by confronting them, recognizing their origins, and realizing that you have left them intellectually behind, resolving that you will emotionally free yourself from their effects.

Then I bid you a fond good evening. I have stuck to the most important beliefs about money, and the male’s status—but also such (family) gatherings also bring into focus beliefs about age and illness, and so forth.

There is a long history connected with such American Puritan beliefs about morality, having to do with the fact that medieval priests were sometimes licentious, and opulent. They did not work in the field (except for the poor monks), and the Protestants determined, for example, that their ministers would have families, work with the people, and be too busy for licentious leisure activities.